Optimize Your Code

Top 10 Reasons for Software Optimization

People often ask me why it is important to optimize software. Many customers believe that once the software is developed and tested, it is ready for a live deployment. Unfortunately, most performance issues and bottlenecks can’t be noticed during the development and testing stages in the software lifecycle primarily because it is difficult to simulate live production scenarios.

People often ask me why it is important to optimize software. Many customers believe that once the software is developed and tested, it is ready for a live deployment. Unfortunately, most performance issues and bottlenecks can’t be handled during the development and testing stages in the software lifecycle primarily because it is difficult to simulate a live deployment scenario.Software optimization, profiling and tuning techniques are vital to ensuring that software runs as expected. In this article, I list the top 10 reasons why software optimization is an absolute must.

1) Faster Execution – Software Optimization helps identify bottlenecks and causes the program to execute faster. A faster program means higher throughput and thereby, an increase in overall productivity.

2) Avoid Resource Hogging – If the source code for any software program is not optimized, it is possible that the program may hog CPU and memory, two of the most vital resources of your computer. Such intensive resource hogging can starve other software programs to death and can even lead to fatal crashes of your software. Optimization ensures that your source code is using CPU and memory efficiently, thereby avoiding being an ‘expensive’ program.

3) Pre-empt Production Issues – Optimization and Profiling Tools allow you to pre- empt production issues and lets you fix them early in the software development cycle. You can conduct a stress test on your source code and profile it using an optimizer to ensure that it will be able to withstand the high traffic conditions which are usually associated with production deployments.

4) Eliminate Dead Code – Dead code refers to the lines of code which are never executed and it is a nightmare for software developers to maintain large codebase which high volume of dead code. Source code optimization helps to minimize dead code in software.

5) Support Cross Platform Deployments – Many source code optimization tools allow you to take advantage of platform dependent features for specific CPU architecture. Therefore, using a good optimization tool, you can ensure that your software runs equally well on multiple hardware architectures and multiple operating systems.

6) Cost Effeciency – Software optimization helps lower the running cost of software as it aids in reducing the memory and CPU requirements. If a program is less CPU intensive, it causes lesser load on the CPU and thereby reduces the cooling requirement of CPU as well.

7) Improve Code Coverage – Most professional optimization tools help to achieve 100% code coverage, thereby ensuring that every condition (often called leg in programming paradigm) is tested before the software goes live.

8) Reduced Data Transfers through Caching – Software optimization promotes caching of data, thereby reducing the volume of data transfer and reducing overall bandwidth requirements.

9) Comprehensive Performance Statistics – Software optimization tools can generate comprehensive performance statistics which help benchmark the performance of any program. Benchmarks are a great way of setting the right expectations for a customer, when it comes to the performance of software.

10) Choosing the right Threading/ Memory Model – In my professional life, I’ve come across many source codes which claim to be ‘multi-threaded’ but in reality, they do not take true advantage of the a processor’s multi-threading capabilities. A professional source code optimization tool helps to profile and tweak the performance of individual threads, thereby helping the programmer fix potential synchronization and waiting issues. Similarly, software optimization helps a programmer to choose the correct memory model to ensure that A) software uses only the required memory and no more B) software never runs out of memory thereby eliminating the risk of ‘Out of memory’ errors.

I’ve heard many critics say that ‘If it ain’t broken, don’t change it’. However, they do not realize that if you don’t change and optimize it, it will break sooner or later!

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